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Best Of Categories, often predictable, but thanks anyway

Original post made
by Resident, Another Palo Alto neighborhood,
on Aug 29, 2007

Just finished reading through the Best Of winners in today's Weekly.
They were often predictable, particularly in sections where there is so little choice. Still, it makes entertaining reading and for the few establishments I have never heard of and am interested in, I will make the effort and try them out.

Posted by Joanna
a resident of Adobe-Meadow
on Aug 30, 2007 at 12:20 pm

This was pretty entertaining to read. Yes, it is too bad about the choices, but what can one do?

I will make an effort to visit some of the restaurants listed as I have not yet done so.

Does MP have their own Readers' Choice issue? I am concerned because a particular health / fitness company did some major ballot stuffing. I saw it with my own eyes. They would fill in the votes for every client and send them in. Sometimes they would tell the client that they had done so. Most of the time, they did not. I think it would be very difficult to track these things down though.

For the winners, it would be nice to read a comment or two by voters on why they voted. I'm interested because my company and I often go out to lunch and we like to know what we can expect ahead of time.

Posted by Resident
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on Aug 30, 2007 at 1:00 pm

I am not sure how the ballot stuffing could have been done because as far as I can remember, it was online and only one ballot for each computer was enabled. Last year, I think it was different and I know that for someyears there was actually a ballot printed in the newspaper that had to be used.

The Palo Alto Weekly and it's sister papers the Almanac and Mountain View Voice use only on-line voting. No paper ballots are allowed. (The Palo Alto Daily News did run a very short-lived contest in August that only utilized paper ballots.}

Ballots are only counted if they are activated after we send out a confirming e-mail to the voter. To reduce the chances of ballot-stuffing by businesses creating a bunch of new e-mail addresses and casting multiple ballots, we also require each voter to vote in at least five categories. Finally, we examine the electronic ballots sent from any e-mail addresses that seem odd...such as a series of numbers or letters that make no sense.

We did uncover one attempt to ballot-stuff in this year's balloting and all of those votes were thrown out. In that case, someone created dozens of very similar e-mail addresses and voted for the minimum five categories. One category was in common, however, and all votes were for the same business. Disqualifying those votes resulted in the business not winning the category.

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